Dai's philosophical contributions included those to the Han Learning school of Evidential Learning (Evidentialism) which criticized the Song Learning school of Neo-Confucianism. In particular, two criticisms that Dai made was: First, Neo-Confucianism focused too much on introspective self-examination whereas truth was to be found in investigation of the external world.

Second, he criticized the Neo-Confucian drive to eliminate human desire as an obstacle to rational investigation. Dai argued that human desire was a good and integral part of the human experience, and that eliminating human desire from philosophy had the bad effect of making it difficult to understand and control one's emotions as well as making it impossible to establish empathy with others.